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The purpose of this paper is to explore the congruencies and incongruences between the moral and entrepreneurial accountabilities of Lillian McMurry to provide insights for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. Ms McMurry was the entrepreneurial force behind the founding of Trumpet Records, a unique, Mississippi Delta Blues record label in the 1950s.

The examination of this historical case study is grounded in the theoretical examination of the tensions between Lillian McMurry’s felt moral and entrepreneurial accountabilities. Using an analytical archival historical method, a narrative explanation of how these tensions influenced the success and, ultimately, the failure of Trumpet Records are developed.

The accounting records highlighted a number of issues hampering the commercial profitability of Trumpet Records. Moreover, the archival and documentary sources examined also proved revealing as to conflicts between Ms McMurry’s personal character and mercantile determination as an entrepreneur.

The approach of using analytically structured historical narrative as a research strategy is but one method of explaining the tensions between the moral and entrepreneurial accountabilities of Lillian McMurry.

The proponents of virtue ethics suggest that this Aristotelian personal character perspective is more fundamental than traditional, act-oriented consequentialist teleological and deontological ethical decision-making approaches. A perspective of moral accountability exceeding the norm of the obstructionist stance is required to maintain a sound balance between entrepreneurial accountability and moral accountability.

This paper adopts a mercantile perspective, using the accounting and related business records of Trumpet Records, to examine the leadership characteristics of Lillian McMurry. Practical lessons learned for entrepreneurs facing the moral dilemma of competing accountabilities and advance questions to spur future research in this area are drawn.

The multiplicity of the late-night television offer is a recent phenomenon. In the late 1940s, TV was still in its experimental stage and programming was limited to certain hours of the day. How then did late-night evolve from one dominant program to the cornucopia that exists today? To what extent did the progressive fragmentation of the media environment contribute to this exponential growth in late-night programs? To answer these questions, this chapter will look closely at three phases of late-night history: the ascendance of The Tonight Show during the Johnny Carson era, Johnny's succession when two princes vied for his late-night throne, and then finally the latest developments where a new generation of late-night royalty, which I refer to as The House of Stewart, would emerge with a plethora of shows. Simultaneously, this chapter will also delve into the media context during each phase which became increasingly fragmented leading to an explosion of new ways of experiencing television.

I aim to understand how informal relationships at work provide a supportive context for individuals and contribute to their engagement in an environment of disruptive change when they are likely to be stressed.

The research was conducted in three UK public service organizations during pre-Brexit disruption. An app was used to capture 400+ transient emotions, reactions, and diary entries of employees about their interactions with co-workers, colleagues, and close colleagues. This was followed by 25 interviews to reflect more deeply on those relationships documented in the app.

Interactions with co-workers, colleagues, and close colleagues are shown to contribute in different ways to emotions felt and different aspects of engagement. Closer relationships, less transactional and more emotional in nature, contribute to feelings of trust, significance, and mutual reliance. A typology of four close colleague relationship types also emerged variously driven by the depth of the relationship and sense of shared mutuality.

This research documents employees' lived experience during disruption to show that relationships provide support for the meaningfulness, psychological safety, and availability aspects of personal engagement. It maps the process of developing supportive workplace relationships that form the relational context with four sub-contexts, distinguishing work, and personal engagement by their different foci. Practical and social implications are discussed.